MESSY
Stella Fox (Alexi Wasser) is like a millennial Carrie Bradshaw with the libido of Samantha Jones. She arrives in New York just off a bad breakup (spoiler alert: they’re all bad breakups) looking for a fresh start and hoping to launch a, yes, Carrie Bradshaw-like writing career. (In a meta homage to the show, the editor of her favorite magazine, Conversation, is played by Sex and the City’s Mario Cantone.)
The film starts with Stella oversharing, as is her wont, to some unseen person about her thoughts on love. “I’m the most miserable when I’m in a relationship,” she confesses. She goes about how relationships make her “profoundly lonely” and how she’s at her best when she’s on her own and yet she “can’t stop looking for love.” “I can never seem to reconcile my never-ending quest for love and my complete discomfort in a relationship,” she sighs.
Then, in a true, “Ma’am this is a Wendy’s” moment, we see who she’s been talking to: an unsuspecting Uber driver who merely asked if she was single.
From there we watch as Stella—who is hyperarticulate, painfully self-aware, and steeped in therapy speak—stumbles from one hook up and relationship to the next. She meets one guy at a party after he throws up. (Always a great start!) She gets involved with a guy who lies about his age and the fact that he has a daughter. (Worse still, he writes terrible poetry). She hooks up with a bartender who like to film them having sex, without her consent, mind you. And so on.
After each failed relationship, she unloads to her two best friends, who serves as a kind of Greek chorus throughout her odyssey.
Stella is addicted to love, and so are we. Despite her questionable taste, we keep hoping the next guy will be “the one.”
Written and directed by Wasser, Messy is a classic first feature: a low budget, knowing sex comedy that serves as both calling card and diary entry. Wasser, with her wide eyes and constant expression of “how did I get here?”, evokes Aubrey Plaza mixed with a touch of Shelley Duvall. Her Stella is like your over-sharey best friend in grad school who makes all the worst choices with men but always has the best stories.
MESSY is the opening night film of the New/Next film festival. Director/writer/star Alexi Wasser is expected to attend.
THE BLACK SEA
Brooklyn resident Khalid (Derrick B. Harden) is the kind of amiable hustler who’s always on the go, quick with a laugh or a friendly greeting for passersby. He’s a chatterbox, an operator, a man with a plan. If he were in your life, you’d be exasperated by him (he can’t seem to hold down a job), but you’d love him, too. How could you not?
In The Black Sea, co-written and directed by Harden, we follow Khalid as he gets invited to Bulgaria to have “adult time” with an older woman that he doesn’t know is dying. (Her fortune teller told her she could be healed by the touch of a Black man.) She promises Khalid she’ll pay him for this time.
Khalid can’t believe his good luck. He thinks this is his ticket to money—he calls her his “Bulgarian sugar mama”—and he doesn’t hesitate to hop on a plane and make his way to her Bulgarian village. People stop him to take selfies—we find out later it’s because he’s the only Black man they’ve ever seen in person (one calls him “Michael Jordan”)—and he cheerfully chats up street vendors and old women sitting on stoops and kids playing outside. But when he gets to the home of his would-be Bulgarian sugar mama, he’s told by her gruff adult son that she’s dead. “So I’m not getting my money?” he asks, in disbelief. “No,” the son says. And that’s that.
Of course, Khalid is broke and, to add insult to injury, his passport is stolen. He calls his cousin in Brooklyn and she basically says, I’m sick of your shit. She won’t be sending him any money.
So he makes his way to a travel agency, run by Ina (Irmena Chichikova), a pretty and lonely young woman. She tells him she can’t get him a plane ticket without a passport. He’s stuck there, for now.
Khalid being Khalid, he makes the best of it. He’s as amused and fascinated by the Bulgarian people as they are by him and soon enough, he knows everyone in town—he even has special handshakes and bearhugs for some of his favorites. He attends parties. He works the docks. Eventually, he and Ina open a coffee shop/karaoke bar.
The Black Sea, which was filmed on location in Bulgarian and largely improvised among real townspeople, is about being a fish out water—but it’s also about how new settings allow room for reinvention and personal growth. The folks in the village don’t know of Khalid, the Screw Up—they see him as an enterprising American with a big, loveable personality. For most of The Black Sea, Khalid is trying to get home. But is he home already?
THE BLACK SEA screens on October 4. Derrick B. Harden and co-director Crystal Moselle are expected to attend.
THE HOBBY
The Hobby starts with an interview with a bearded old man who might as well be Father Time, himself. He’s a curator at an ancient history museum and he explains that people have always played games. To play games is to be human. However, he has zero interest in the current iteration of game playing, which he finds vulgar. And no, he’s not talking about online gaming but actual board games, which are still a big deal. (Who knew?)
Simon Ennis’ film gives an all-access pass to this subculture, taking us into hobby centers, conventions, private game rooms teeming with boxes, and ultimately, the World Series of Board Games in Vegas, where the gamers compete for bragging rights and $25,000 (but mostly bragging rights.) In this defiantly nerdy community, the goal is not just to be great at games, but to invent a game of your own. Ennis gives us hero shots of triumphant gamers wielding their games—physical media, in boxes!—walking in slo-mo as they approach the camera.
We meet many characters—a self-aware aging hipster type who knows he needs to be less competitive (but can’t help himself), a young Black woman who has been embraced by the “war game” community (mostly old white guys), an ornithologist who made a bird board game that made her a minor celebrity, and a philosopher-gamer who explains gaming as “having in interesting struggle you wouldn’t have otherwise.”
One of the film’s more memorable characters is a would-be game inventor named John Hague who is trying to get funding for his game, The Last Summit. He goes to a game café and sits there, forlornly, as the patrons ignore him. Then he goes to a small game convention and after sitting alone for several unbearable minutes finally gets some gamers to play—and he’s thrilled to see them get invested in his invention. When he makes his funding goal on GoFundMe, we feel as proud as if we’d invented the game ourselves.
The Hobby is a celebration of nerd culture, for sure, but also an acknowledgement that play is best when it’s done together—in person, not on a computer screen. When the games are in full swing, and the room is buzzing with competition and ingenuity, there’s not an iPhone in sight.
THE HOBBY screens on October 6. Director Simon Ennis is expected to attend.
EX-HUSBANDS
Despite Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s fabled “conscious uncoupling,” most divorces are messy ordeals with one spouse looking to break free and the other feeling hurt and betrayed.
Early in Noah Pritzker’s wryly observant Ex-Husbands, Simon Pearce (Richard Benjamin) announces to his adult son, Peter (a great Griffin Dunne), that he’s leaving his mother. Peter is aghast: Simon is at least 80. Why on earth would he leave his devoted wife now? Simon explains that he wants to live his life, romantic and otherwise, on his own terms while he still can. He may only have 20 or 30 good years left.
Fast forward six years later, Simon is in a nearly catatonic state in a nursing home after having suffered a major stroke. And Peter, who is a dentist, is getting divorced from his wife (Rosanna Arquette). She’s sent the divorce papers for him to sign, but he harbors hope that they can still work things out (they’re on good terms). Nonetheless, he’s slowly coming to terms with it. He has a new apartment, which he’s tastefully decorated, and he’s planned a vacation to clear his head, to Tulum.
When Mickey (Miles Heizer), the younger of his two sons, hears that dad is going to Tulum, he’s shocked. That’s where he’s taking his big brother, Nick (James Norton), for his bachelor party, he exclaims. Peter insists that he had no idea that his sons were going to Tulum. Dad, I definitely told you, Mickey grumbles.
A great question for the post-film Q&A is this: Did Peter know his sons would be in the Mexico at the same time as him? My guess is yes, albeit subconsciously. His denials are so convincing he seems to believe them himself.
Indeed, although all three men are on the same plane, they go their separate ways in Tulum—the fellas to an Airbnb type house, Peter to a nice resort. (Notably, there are workers who clean the algae off the beach in Peter’s resort.) But Nick, who is famously contrarian and prone to depression (“my doctor told me I have double depression,” he sadly tells Mickey) seems pretty down in the dumps for a guy about to get married.
And Mickey, who is gay and fairly recently out of the closet, finds himself flirting with one of Nick’s (married) friends. Is it his imagination or is this guy into him? Maybe the brothers need their father, after all.
If you’re big on plot, Ex-Husbands may not be the film for you. If you love believably lived in, witty, quietly emotional films—think of works by Ira Sachs or Noah Baumbach or Nicole Holefcener—that explore the inner lives of neurotic urbanites, the bonds of family, and the relationships that manage to break and sustain us, Ex-Husbands will feel like a gift.
EX-HUSBANDS is the closing night film of the New/Next Festival. Director Noah Pritzker, star Griffin Dunne, and producer Alexandra Byer are expected to attend.